every day," without a thought of the Lazaruses at their doors, is a moral anomaly which can not on these principles be explained.* That the pioneers of progress, the apostles of civil and religious liberty, should have rotted in dungeons, perished at the stake, by the gibbet, or by the ax, after a life spent in toils and labors, while we, their descendants, enjoy the fruit of those labors without an effort, and too often without gratitude, is another spectacle of injustice which might well rouse us to indignation. But grant another world, where all grievances will be redressed, all anomalies removed, all wrongs set right; grant a just and wise Ruler, who is taking care that "good" shall ever be "the final goal of ill,"† and all these difficulties disappear. The world, from being the most revolting of all exhibitions of favoritism, injustice, cruelty, becomes a school of patience, a means of training for all the noblest virtues, a path of progress to the perfection of humanity in other scenes and under other skies.‡

Another argument will serve to confirm this position. If this world be the only one, you have no force sufficiently strong to restrain man's passions. Tell the lad with his hand in his master's till that he ought to refrain from taking what is another's, because such conduct is, on a wide view, incompatible with the welfare of humanity, and what can you say to him if he replies: "What is humanity to me? Why should I trouble myself about any man's convenience, but my own?" Tell the young man who is about to rush into vicious courses, of the misery and wretchedness which result to society in general from the indulgence of evil passions, and how are you to deal with him if he answers: "I do not care how it affects other people. It pleases me, and that is all I have to care about." Tell the drunkard of the evils that flow from his unrestrained self-indulgence, and how can you answer him if he says: "Life is short; let me enjoy myself while I may." "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."§ There is no *At least God, as revealed in Jesus Christ, does not contemplate this state of things with indifference. (St. Luke xvi.)

†Tennyson, "In Memoriam."

"Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." (2 Peter iii, 13.)

? Mr. Herbert Spencer is quite of Voltaire's opinion that if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one, in order to bridle the scoundrel, to give hope to the upright, to serve as a bond to society, a foundation for equity. Mr. Spencer admits that in a rudimentary condition man needs a “belief that is harsh, and habitually shows attachment to such a belief." (First Principles, p. 119.) Voltaire, be it remembered, was a violent opponent of Christianity, though perhaps he might have thought differently if he had had a less corrupt state of society and the Church presented to him.

passion so gross, no iniquity so cruel, but you give a man a justification for indulging it if you take away his belief in God. If there be no God, there is no right or wrong, or rather there is nothing around us but wrong. The world itself is one grievous wrong, one vast bad example to all who dwell therein. And where are you to look for a moral force strong enough to restrain a man who is urged on by violent passions, if you remove the thought of a just and righteous retribution in another world? What is to prevent a sudden rush of every infamy and every crime upon us, if you take away the only restraint on vicious indulgence?

THE LESSON OF LIFE.

The pain we have to suffer seems so broad
Set side by side with this life's narrow span,
We need no greater evidence that God
Has some diviner destiny for man.

He would not deem it worth his while to send
Such crushing sorrows as pursue us here,
Unless beyond this fleeting journey's end
Our chastened spirits found another sphere.

So small this world, so vast its agonies,
A future life is needed to adjust
These ill-proportioned wide discrepancies
Between the spirit and its frame of dust.

So, when my soul writhes with some aching grief
And all my heart-strings tremble at the strain,
My reason lends new courage to belief,

And all God's hidden purposes seem plain.

(Ella Wheeler Wilcox.)

PROOFS OF IMMORTALITY FROM THE POWER AND BREVITY OF LIFE.

"I can not humiliate the condition of our being to the narrow career of life; I see immortality in every aspiration of man. The proof of the great fact, that man shall live beyond the grave, must depend upon the resistless authority of Scripture. Immortality can be proclaimed by inspiration alone. But I see its corroborative evidence in every power, impulse, and imagination of human nature.

"I can not bring myself to conceive that the intellect which measures the courses of the stars, which weighs the globe, which resolves the fine tissues of light, and which reveals the structure of

the earth, can have been given only to heighten the moral of our decay; that the faculties which have controlled the lightning, have ruled the winds and waves, and have guided us over the ocean through night and storm, were given but to tantalize the brevity of human aspirations; that the talent which covers the canvas with life, sculptures the stone into beauty, and creates the grandeur of architecture, all should vanish, like the floating atoms seen only by a passing ray of sunshine. Above all, that the genius of the poet, the preacher, the philosopher, and the statesman, those founts of thought flowing for all mankind and for all time; those pinnacles on the great palace of intellectual empire, which catch the first light of nations and retain the last; those minds, whose very dreams are of immortality, whose words descend upon posterity with the impress of an inspiration, and whose memories remain, like altars on mountain-tops, fixing the eyes and directing the worship of all below,-that all these should be compressed into a clod of the valley!

"Impossible! No; we must not libel the wisdom or the benef icence of the great Disposer. Man was not sent here only for a glimpse of those splendors which he was never to share-to pine for that intellectual banquet from which, at its first sight, he was to be snatched away; to feel his heart filled and his spirit exalted by that majesty of creation, from whose worship he was to be banished at the first bend of his knee!

"The brevity of human existence, and even the precariousness of that existence, are arguments for its higher destiny. If a touch, the breaking of a fiber, too minute to be visible, the sting of an insect, may extinguish forever the finest imaginations of the poet, the profoundest thought of the philosopher, and the noblest purposes of the statesman, where do we find such waste in nature? Not a dying leaf is thrown away, not a drop of water is lost, not a particle of earth but varies into new forms.

"And is man to be the only instance of this contemptuous prodi- gality of creation? The whole analogy of nature compels us to believe that the great purpose of Providence in this world is to train both our moral and intellectual faculties for a perpetuity of progress in another, to exercise our mental nerve for the conquest of perpetual difficulty, rewarded by a perpetual increase of power, and that power given only to render us capable of the knowledge of a higher sphere, to prepare our intellectual eyes for the expanding glories, and to invigorate the spirit of man for the mighty mysteries of Providence." (Anonymous.)

THE BALMY EFFULGENCE OF MORN.

(James Beattie's pensive lines on "The Hermit" show well how man may lament if no light dawus on the night of the grave, and how the morning really does break upon the soul of him who cries to the great Father of light for pity.)

"At the close of the day, when the hamlet is still,

And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove;
When nought but the torrent is heard on the hill,
And nought but the nightingale's song in the grove;
'T was thus, by the cave of the mountain afar,
While his harp rang symphonious, a hermit began;
No more with himself, or with nature, at war,

He thought as a sage, though he felt as a man:

Ah! why thus abandoned to darkness and woe?
Why, lone Philomela, that languishing fall?
For Spring shall return, and a lover bestow,
And sorrow no longer thy bosom enthrall.
But if pity inspire thee, renew the sad lay;

Mourn, sweetest complainer; man calls thee to mourn.
O soothe him, whose pleasures like thine pass away;
Full quickly they pass-but they never return.

Now gliding remote, on the verge of the sky,
The moon half extinguished her crescent displays;
But lately I marked, when majestic on high

She shone, and the planets were lost in her blaze.
Roll on, thou fair orb, and with gladness pursue
The path that conducts thee to splendor again :
But man's faded glory what change shall renew?
Ah, fool! to exult in a glory so vain!

"Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more:

I mourn; but, ye woodlands, I mourn not for you;
For morn is approaching, your charms to restore,

Perfumed with fresh fragrance and glittering with dew:

Nor yet for the ravage of Winter I mourn;

Kind nature the embryo blossom will save;

But when shall Spring visit the moldering urn?

O, when shall day dawn on the night of the grave?

'T was thus, by the light of false science betrayed,
That leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind,

My thoughts wont to roam, from shade onward to shade,
Destruction before me, and sorrow behind.

'O, pity, great Father of light,' then I cried,

"Thy creature, that fain would not wander from thee:
Lo, humbled in dust, I relinquish my pride:

From doubt and from darkness thou only canst free!'

And darkness and doubt are now flying away;
No longer I roam in conjecture forlorn:

So breaks on the traveler, faint and astray,

The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn.
See Truth, Love, and Mercy, in triumph descending,
And nature all glowing in Eden's first bloom!

On the cold cheek of Death smiles and roses are blending,
And Beauty immortal awakes from the tomb."

IMPORTANCE OF THE CHRISTIAN BELIEF.

As a cobbler sat at his work, the pendulum of the clock, as it swung, seemed to him to say: "Eternity-where?" This led to his conversion, and the words so much impressed him that he afterward penned these lines:

"Eternity-where?' it floats in the air;

Amid clamor or silence, it ever is there,
The question so solemn: Eternity—where?'

'Eternity-where?' O, 'Eternity-where?'

With redeemed ones in glory, or fiends in despair?
With one or the other: Eternity-where?'

'Eternity-where?' is well worth a care;
O shall we, O can we, e'en venture to dare
Do aught till we settle 'Eternity-where?'

'Eternity-where?' O, 'Eternity-where?'

Friend, sleep not, nor take in this world any share,

·

Till you answer this question: Eternity-where?'"

"Of course," says the Pittsburg Christian Advocate, "if existence ends in the sleep that knows no waking, the believer in Christ will be disappointed in his faith and hope of a future life; but it is a loss of which he will not be conscious, and will be attended with no pain, no lashings of conscience, no terrible remorse. The faith which religion brings, the hope it inspires, and the happy influence it sheds over the life, make it one of the grandest delusions, if it be a delusion, ever conceived by the human mind. It promotes virtue and usefulness, and leads to a peaceful and happy end. Though it ends in disappointment, still it has its present reward-the reward of virtue—the answer of a good conscience, no little thing. He will share the common fate of humanity, so that the most zealous scoffer at his faith will have no room to glory, and can not outrank him in destiny and reward.

66 But suppose he is not mistaken; suppose he is the prudent man